I read your comments regarding the POWs and MIAs, your feelings that no one was left behind, your belief that Joe Schlatter has all the right answers, and the dissenting reply by Dave Murray.* Although I don't have a web site, I have written on the topic of the POW mysteries and listed my challenges to what is being said and done by the government.* I do this, not as an outsider, but from my former position as an insider.

Your assumptions are incorrect, because your basic information is false and manipulated by intelligence services and bureaucrats from both sides of the old Superpower rivalry - a rivalry which is not dead, but is merely changing form for the conflicts that will arise in the next century.

From 1970-1993, I served in the Clandestine Service with a Special Operations and paramilitary specialty.* I served 5 years in Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia.* I also retired as a Navy Commander with 33 years Reserve and 8 years active time.* After retiring from the CIA, I went back on active duty for 3 years, where my last assignment was as a Special POW investigator for the Joint Commission Support Directorate, part of DPMO.

After testifying twice before the Dornan Subcommittee 17 SEP and 1 OCT 1996 that the American public was not being told the truth about 9000 "Unrepatriated POWs" who were exploited by the Soviets from 1918 through 1975, I completed my last tour of active duty and retired.* I had volunteered to continue as a POW investigator, and my supervisor Norm Kass fought for me to be hired as a civilian, but by that time I had already challenged the system, and my 8 hours of closed session testimony - in which specifics that the American public has a right to know were discussed in unclassified form -- my fate was sealed.

I encountered actual sabotage of JCSD POW operations within DPMO, and documented the details for the Dornan Subcommittee testimony.* I was backed by Norm Kass, Al Graham, Joe Douglass and another man during the testimony.* Even General Wold, then Director of DPMO, did not dispute the facts.

As a Clandestine Service officer, I know about things that happened in the Cold War that Joe Schlatter and his ilk never confronted.* When that experience was about to be put into action as part of the investigations, and contacts were being made with "old friends" who used to be on the "other side" of the Berlin Wall.* Norm Kass and I intercepted a memo within DPMO that revealed that a "Special Initiative" we had planned and had approved by Wold was leaked to other Directorate Chiefs and the "Old Guard" who vowed in the memo that our "operations would never see the light of day."

Why?* Because you, the families, and the public are not being told the truth.* And that fact would be embarrassing, not just to this Administration, but to several generations of bureaucrats. To be honest, I do not know that any POW is still alive today. I do know that many were alive at various times in history after the conflicts ended, and that a total of 9000 American POWs, a conservative estimate, were transferred into the Soviet Gulag as part of a long-term, covert Soviet intelligence exploitation program that was conducted by the Bolsheviks, the MVD, the MKVD, the KGB and GRU from 1918 through at least 1975 and possibly 1979 - 1980.* The program continued to be protected and concealed by Soviet intelligence after the end of the Vietnam War, and whatever American POWs were transferred to the USSR prior to the fall of Saigon, or afterwards, met whatever fate time handed them.

The Russian SVR, which was not purged of its communists nor its intelligence apparatus and personnel after the so-called "fall of communism" in 1992, continues to conceal the POW Exploitation Programs as an operational intelligence necessity.* The probability that the Russians will require similar programs and resources in the coming conflicts of the 21st century has not escaped them.

Since departing JCSD and DPMO, I have continued to follow the leads that were thwarted when I was with the government.* In the past year I have traveled to East Berlin and twice to Cuba, where former and current military and intelligence officers have confirmed to me, and provided some documentation to support their stories that what DPMO was saying about several Communist Intelligence Operations not existing were a "lie."

As for Joe Schlatter, I never met the man.* He retired from DPMO in late 1994, and I did not start work there until May 1995.* Yet he still insists to people that I worked under him, that he knew me,* and that he wrote my last fitness report (a good trick since my last fitness report was written two years after he Retired.)* If he can be so wrong about those simple realities, and if he insists on continuing to lie about them even after documentation has been presented to prove him either a nut or a liar, how can you believe the man when he is protecting his own misconduct and malfeasance in office?

As for men being held back, I personally know two men who were captured and still in prison after Saigon fell.* One came back in Dec 75 after secret Negotiations then died in the Beirut bombings in 1983.* Another was tortured to death in August 1976, and his remains quietly returned years later. Several men were captured in Laos in 1970-1973 and did not return at Homecoming.* Some of the leads that I was following as part of the Special Initiative dealt with the reports that just under 200 American POWs were held back until 1976, when a Politburo decision eliminated them from the face of the earth.

Americans were taken to the Soviet Gulag beginning in 1918-1920 when an estimated minimum of 43 men, and possibly as many as 200 POWs were taken from the combat fronts of the North Russian and Siberian Allied Expeditionary Forces.* President Wilson did not protest (probably was not even aware)and the Bolsheviks learned they could get away with kidnapping our Soldiers.

In the Depression years, American agents were detained and thrown into prison, without the U.S. government protesting, because of its own operational secrecy and deniability.* After 6 years of captivity, one of these men escaped and walked 4000 miles to freedom in an incredible escape of all time. Last year, I talked to the only known survivor (now 83) of that escape in Europe.

After World War II, Stalin kept 7000 American POWs taken from the German Stalags, and put them in the Gulags as revenge for the Allies not returning all of the 1 million Russians who fought for Hitler against him, and for not returning all the millions of refugees who had fled communism in the 1930s and 1940s to the west.* U.S. Army documents of 1945 merely switched the POWs over the MIA column of accountability to hide what happened.

In Korea, knowing that the U.S. had a habit of not protesting the retention of its POWs, and in keeping with a Soviet training doctrine promulgated in 1949 to the Chinese, North Koreans, and the Viet Minh, 2000 American POWs from Korea and an estimated 5000 French Foreign Legionnaires (non-French) were transferred to Siberia and other parts of the USSR.

Major General Jan Sejna, who defected to the west in 1968, and at whose Death Bedside I was at in August 1997, was an eye-witness to the transfer of 200 American POWs from Korea to Moscow via Prague.* The underground railway continued, with lesser numbers, into the Vietnam War.* On his deathbed, Sejna swore to me that he was telling the truth about what he saw.

GRU Colonel Stan Lunev, revealed to me in 1995 that he had talked about the transfer of American POWs from Vietnam to Kazakstan when he defected in 1992.* That information, obtained and disseminated by the FBI in a debriefing report to the DIA, was suppressed by the DIA POW office.* When I resurfaced the information, the same officer who squelched it before, Chuck Trowbridge, attempted to do so again.* Lunev has now published a book in which the information is repeated.

There is a very logic, and methodical way in which the Bolsheviks, the Communists, and now the Russians have approached the clandestine operations that exploited several generations of Unrepatriated American POWs, along with other foreign POWs and millions of Russians.

As to why the Russians have not admitted the operations, it goes to the heart of who they are as a political nation, and what they see as in their own interests not to reveal.* As for the U.S. role, LTCOL Phil Corso, former POW Special Projects Officer under Eisenhower, said it best when I debriefed him in July 1996.

"When you expose what the Soviets did to our men, you will have to expose the U.S. Policies that allowed it to happen.* When you begin to do that, you will be met with diversion and paralysis.* They will divert your attention and paralysis your efforts."

The only way to find the truth is to separate JCSD from DPMO, and establish an investigative office under Norm Kass that is exclusively aimed at uncovering the truth about America's Unrepatriated POWs.* Let CILHI and JTF-FA continue the search for MIAs, which both the American and Communist sides equate to battlefield deaths.

Remember, even if there are no more live POWs left anywhere in the world, we still owe it to them to determine their fate and the truth about the programs that did keep them alive for many years, whatever their final outcome.* Remember too, that when a POW died, he did not become an MIA as you are being lulled into thinking.* He became a dead POW, and that, my friend, is a hell of a difference from being an 'MIA.'

Best Regards,
CDR Chip Beck, USNR (Retired)
Former POW Investigator

__________________.

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A travesty of justice for U.S. soldiers........., March 12, 2003
Reviewer: Kyle Tolle (Phoenix, Arizona United States)

Soldiers of Misfortune, covering World War II, the Korean war, and Vietnam, is a profoundly shocking insight as to what has become of thousands of U.S. POW's during these wars. According to the authors, years of investigative work went into the formulation of the book and it is clearly evident in the text.

Painstaking attention has been given and recorded to remove anyone's doubts of this books authenticity. The authors list a staggering record of POW's forever lost to our enemies, the names of prison camps and gulags where they were held, intricate dates and timelines of events, and eyewitness accounts of vital information pertaining to U.S. soldiers forgotten by our govenment.

In the years following World War II, the Korean war, and Vietnam, the actions by our govenment to conceal data concerning our POW's and it's campaigns to silence anyone investigating the issue is absolutely apalling. This book will define for the reader the gross misuses of power, illegal tactics to manipulate and humiliate citizens seeking honest answers, and the use of outright threats and intimidation to bury the subject forever.

Great credit is due to the authors of this book for their courage and perseverance to expose the plight of our lost U.S. servicemen. This book is very highly recommended to everyone who would like an untainted and factual look into the heartbreaking saga of missing U.S. soldiers.

Readers may also be interested in "Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States betrayed its own POW's in Vietnam" by Monica Jensen-Stevenson and William Stevenson. Excellent source material here that reiterates much information found in Soldiers of Misfortune.

BETRAYAL TO ALL MIA/POW FAMILIES & POW"S., July 7, 1998
Reviewer: A reader

Absolutely, this is the most riveting and explosive book I have ever read. I served 2 tours of combat duty in the Korean WAR; futhermore, had I been privy to this read, you could never have gotten me back to Korea- never -. The Big Lie, spawned out of the Beltway since 1945 to the present, is inconcievable, that the DoD, State Dept, Pentagon and Joint Chiefs of Staff [all], deny the existense of American GI"s languishing in Siberia, Red China, North Korea and North Vietnam . Imagine, former POW"s readily admit, they had seen American POW"s herded off to the Soviet Union and to Red China. Whose hearts go out to our MIA/POW families whom have been grossly and deliberately LIED to by government officials ?? Whereas, our Presidents [all] since 1945, turned their backs on all captured American POW"s. I pray, from this hurt, that one American staggers out of the Soviet Union to corroborate all, in this vale of tears- maybe, just maybe - the apathetic American populace will wake up to being had by a devious lot in our nation"s capital, as they go about THEIR business as usual. If this read doesn"t make your blood boil, then you aren"t alive; however, the assertions, send an ambigious message to any teenager who may be thinking about enlisting: "I wonder, will my President and countrymen come to my rescue if I am captured by the enemy"?? It is your call youngsters. Sayonara.